Customer Reviews

Colossus: The First Electronic Computer (Popular Science)

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The story of the Bletchley Park code breaking efforts towards the German Enigma machine are well known. (If you are not familar the best book on the Enigma is:The German Enigma Cipher Machine: Beginnings, Success, and Ultimate Failure - ISBN 1-58053-996-3) Down through the years there have been only casual references to the Colossus machine that was used on the more sophisticated German coding machines.

At last enough material has been declassified to enable the story to be told. Dr. Copeland, Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing and author of some very good books on Alan Turing, has collected an amazing amount of information on Colossus. This has come from various sources, primarily in the form of short essays written by people who worked on or with Colossus during ther war.

This is an important book covering not only a little explored aspect of World War II but also an important step in the development of electronic computers. It also talks about how Colossus was held secret for so long that the important developments which it entailed might have helped Britain retain greater prosperity after the war.

An excellent, ground breaking book, highly recommended.

This book is a copendium of histories from the people who were at Bletchley Park who actually did the code breaking. I found their stories facinating. There is also some moderately technical information that describes how the several code breaking machines worked. This is the first description that I have seen of the effort to break the codes associated with the German teletytpe system. I found the book facinating.

This provides a good general history of the breaking of the German Lorenz and (to a lesser extent) Siemens cipher teletypes, focusing mostly on the British methods using the Heath Robinson and Colossus tabulating machines driven by punched tapes. The breaking of these differed from the breaking of the Enigma machines in that the methods were probabilistic and statistical rather than the logical operations of the Turing and Welchman electromechanical Bombes, so that the mathematics (relegated to appendices) are very different. The appendices include the Swedish mathematician Arne Burling's breaking of the Siemens machine on leased cables from Norway through Sweden.

For understanding the mathematics, I prefer Harvey Cragon's "From Fish to Colossus" or Frank Carter's pamphlets sold by Bletchley Park, which seem to be currently unavailable, and Cragon includes descriptions (and schematics) of much of the circuitry of the Colossi. It is interesting to read in Copeland's book descriptions by many of those who actually made the breakthroughs.

For those interested in the history of computing, or for those intersted in the history of "code breaking" at Bletchley Park, this book is a must.
The Colossus was a proto-computer in that it was not a stored program machine, or easily programmable, but it solved so many problems, such as parallel processing, use of multiple valves (tubes), with high reliability, etc. that plagued other early computers. It enabled the reading of the teletypewriter encryptions produced by a twelve wheel encyptor, far more difficult than the Enigma encodings. The book leaves out no technical detail recoovered from Winston Churchill's ill-advided destruction of the ten Colossi after the war. A reconstruction 60 years later showed that the Colossus could be reconnected to do multiplication. Because of tight secrecy of many years, the remarkable architecture of Colossus was not availble to inspire other inventors of early computers.
This is a fascinating book.

What if I told you that a secret project conducted more than 60 years ago held the true origins of the modern computing era? And that the country behind this project did such a good job erasing its tracks that it did itself a disservice? And that many of the things invented during this project would only be realized with modern-day PCs?

This book is a wonderful collection of first-person accounts and you get to see the enormity of the task and exactly how critical this effort was towards winning the war. If you got excited about crypto stuff in the DaVinci Code then you will have lots of hours of fun trying to work through the examples the authors provide.